Smitten by the Subway

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: July 23, 2000

IF you have set foot on a subway platform during the last 20 years, there is a decent chance he has been standing there next to you, a small, smiling man in no hurry to catch a train.

He was probably carrying a green satchel with a tiny American flag stitched on the flap. From this satchel, he probably produced a pair of junk store binoculars or a cheap camera and pointed them in the direction of a rust-stained wall that seemed to warrant neither close inspection nor documentation.

You probably did not notice him. He tends to fade into the tilework. And Philip Ashforth Coppola likes it that way. But once, on Aug. 29, 1978, he pinned a plastic envelope to his shirt, slipped a name tag inside and summoned up the courage to conduct his own private poll at four Midtown subway stations. He ''collared whoever looked like a likely candidate,'' as he later wrote, and with all the burning intensity of the Ancient Mariner, he asked a question:

''Are you aware of the subway art?''

Mr. Coppola was talking about what he loved most in the world, the rivers of subterranean design -- in mosaic, faience, terra cotta, tile and steel -- that a grander generation of public builders had bequeathed the humble and hurried subway rider.

The question was met mostly with blank stares that summer morning. But it mattered dearly to Mr. Coppola for a couple of reasons. One was that so many of his beloved treasures were either crumbling or being blithely buried in subway renovations.

Another reason happened to be that Mr. Coppola, then on the verge of turning 30, a sometime dishwasher, a sometime printing press operator with little training in design and none in writing, had just decided to devote the rest of his life to writing and publishing at his own expense an exhaustive, multivolume, painstakingly detailed history of the design and decoration of every one of the stations -- 496, by his count -- that ever existed in the New York City subway system.

In the pantheon of the New York City subway buff, a loose fraternity of urban transit fans who tend to begin in romanticism and veer into outright obsession, you could think of Mr. Coppola as the emperor of the obsessives.

He does not, like one buff in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, have a mock-up of a motorman's cab in his extra bedroom, supplemented with recorded sounds from the subway to make sitting in the cab more realistic.

He also does not, like another buff in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, save money by driving a used Toyota Camry so he can buy expensive handmade model trains and turn his apartment into a miniature subway system.

He certainly does not, like one veteran subway buff who tends to turn up at every Transit Authority function, sport a huge tattoo of a subway car on his bicep.

But during almost a quarter of a century, what Mr. Coppola has done takes him beyond the bounds of even the most devoted railroad hobbyist. He has spent nearly every spare minute -- weekends, vacations, long nights too many to count -- haunting subway stations, libraries, archives, museums and microfilm readers in search of even the tiniest shards of fact for his masterwork.

The danger, of course, was that he could have ended up another Joe Gould, the Greenwich Village eccentric who claimed to have written a nine-million-word opus called ''The Oral History of Our Time,'' largely drawn from overheard conversations and, in the end, largely existing in Mr. Gould's imagination.

But Mr. Coppola, who is single and lives in Maplewood, N.J., was not just a dreamer. In 1984, after almost six years of hovering over his sketch pad and his I.B.M. Selectric II, he self-published the first heavy volume of ''Silver Connections: A Fresh Perspective on the New York Area Subway Systems.'' Another volume appeared in 1990 and a third in 1994. The fourth and most recent, a thick digression that covers the design of the Manhattan and Hudson Railroad, the predecessor of the PATH train, came out last December. And after revising Volume I (''Simply far too much purple prose in that one,'' he says. ''Do not read too deeply into it.'') he plans to begin No. 5, which he hopes will appear in 2004 and will take the subway saga all the way up to 1915.

Stacked on top of one another, the volumes, published in small batches, measure nine inches high. Not counting the mind-boggling bibliographies and indexes, they add up to more than 1,900 pages, several hundred thousand words and more than 1,000 of Mr. Coppola's hand drawings.

Mr. Coppola is now 52 years old.

He has 404 more subway stations to go.

''I always thought nine was a good round number, nine volumes,'' he says. ''Now I am not so sure.''

He hopes his readers will like all of them, of course. But you get the sneaking sense from Mr. Coppola that his most devoted reader will always be Philip Ashforth Coppola. And this is perfectly fine with him.

''Now if you're not the sort to be terribly concerned about whence there came the New York subway, nor how it came about,'' he writes in the introduction to Volume I, ''then I still suggest you keep this book on your bedside table, in case you can't sleep some night; I especially recommend my thoughts upon the extensions to the upper Broadway stations, found in my review of the 137th Street IRT station (pp. 338-341).''

''A paragraph or two should send you off splendidly.''

To outsiders, the world of the true subway buff, or rail fan, as many like to be called, has never been easy to understand.